WUNRN
USA - TOO MANY VICTIMS OF GUN
VIOLENCE ARE WOMEN
January 7, 2012 by Heidi Yewman
Lonnie Feather was sitting on the couch when her boyfriend walked in, covered her face with a pillow and shot her four times. Two bullets grazed her skull, one went into her neck and one hit her cheek. For the next four hours, Lonnie played dead on the couch hoping not to bleed to death. When her boyfriend—busy making a shopping list of items needed to dispose of her body: duct tape, plastic bags, etc—left to answer the door, Lonnie quickly dialed 911. A SWAT team rescued her three hours later. Somehow Lonnie survived incredible physical trauma, but not without deep and permanent scars to her face. Her emotional scars will also last forever, but are getting better with time.
Lonnie’s story is far from unique. She is one of too many victims of gun
violence in the
We don’t need stats to understand how much gun violence affects women; we see it on the evening news. Sometimes it’s a girl who’s accidentally shot by her brother, like 10-year-old Emilee Randall who was killed when her 14-year-old brother pointed his dad’s revolver at her; sometimes it’s a stray bullet from a gang shooting that hits a girl playing in her yard, like 8-year-old Katherine Cook; sometimes it’s a park ranger shot in a National Park after Congress passes a law allowing loaded weapons in those parks, like Margaret Anderson, murdered on New Year’s Day near Mount Rainer. And sometimes it’s a Congresswoman, like Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot at point-blank range in the head by a disturbed man (but legal gun owner) as she greeted constituents in a Safeway parking lot.
In 1986, I graduated from
Ever since, I’ve tried to do what I can to raise awareness of gun violence. I met Lonnie, and several women like her, when I wrote a book called Beyond the Bullet about the impact that gun violence has on regular people. On Jan. 8, the one-year anniversary of Giffords’ shooting outside that Arizona Safeway, as part of the national Too Many Victims remembrance, I’ll light a candle along with hundreds of other women around the country to bring light to the problem of gun violence and the toll it has taken on women. I will light a candle for those women I’ve interviewed, still dealing with unspeakable loss years after the worst day of their lives. I will light a candle for Emilee, Katherine and Gabrielle. I’ll light a candle for Lonnie Feather, whose courage and strength are quite simply inspirational. If you’d like to light a candle for one of the 30,000 people killed each year by gun violence, visit the Brady Campaign and find out how to participate in a vigil in your community.
Photo from Flickr user Secretly Ironic under Creative Commons 2.0